I'm a retired Petroleum Engineer that taught HS Math for 10+ years in the middle of my career. If I could give the youth of America one gift, it would be school choice. OUTSTANDING post!
Started homeschooling our children when they were in grade six, 1988. My son had been falling between cracks, losing his confidence. My dd was bright and bored with school. As well, it was a Catholic school, and the faith was not being transmitted, and there were errors. Further, modern social expectations and lax morals were increasingly evident.
Found a US Catholic homeschooling school. We really could not afford it, but could not afford not to. I knew too much; I knew I was called to do this. Further, we knew this was a war for our children’s souls. We made do; we cut back.
They homeschooled through HS, went on to colleges and started careers. They are married, have lots of happy homeschooled children who are finished schooling by lunch and can pursue crafts, and outdoor / creative activities. The older ones have afternoon farm jobs and are saving a bundle of money for … trade schools. Phones for older ones are only for texting re work/travel. No TV. Yes, computers for online schooling and research. Computers are parent passworded. Yes, they are innocent - beautifully innocent in the best sort of way. Yes, they are comfortable and sociable around adults. And they are very cognizant about world affairs, unlike some of their public school peers.
The world seeks to grab the hearts, minds and souls of our children. We must, must, must push back. Is it easy? No. Rewarding? Absolutely. We’d do it all over again. Fr John Hardon SJ laughingly said three decades ago that homeschooled children might be the only literate people left 😅
Thanks very much for sharing your homeschooling story. I really enjoyed reading it. I live in Oklahoma. There has been an incredible increase in homeschooling, especially post-scamdemic. I hope it continues to grow.
We used Seton Homeschooling out of Front Royal, Virginia, as do our children currently use with our grandchildren. Grades 1-12.
You can use the entire curriculum for each grade which includes excellent books and workbooks, plus online assistance. Every week and every day is laid out for you.
Others just order the Seton books and workbooks at a reduced rate (they come with answer keys).
Some prefer live online classes. Queen of Heaven Academy from Arizona offers this.
An excellent resource is Homeschool Connections out of the US which offers hundreds of topics and subjects you view online - and are graded by the teacher. You can pay for these live online classes that are graded - or pay much less by watching recorded classes. Ideal for high school and interested adults.
If you want people to be able to think logically, get rid of the thing that is making them think illogically - the trance-inducing, pulsing blue light from the screen that is irradiating their brain, while trusting the department of education.
They've confused it with the department of subjugation.
I'm so old, I remember when television was a new thing. My parents' generation grew up without it. It wasn't long before TV was colloquially referred to as the 'boob tube'.
It's not so much how good or bad the content was, as that you simply sat there and absorbed what it showed you. No interaction, no thought process, no participation. Ideal for 'boobs'.
This time, about 75 years ago is the first time that such a device existed. Prior to that, and for the entire existence of mankind, all human interaction was participatory to at least some degree. Just sitting there and absorbing content was unknown. Imagine that!
Talking movies predate TV by about 30 years, but you didn't spend every evening watching them.
I can easily see the degree to which many people today presume that their civic duty is to absorb the dictates of their 'leaders'. Intellectually, they are incapable of sorting thru conflicting points of view, so they just pick a side. Today, many of those people are teachers.
I know early 60s TV isn't the Great Books of Western Civ, however, the cultural touchstones provided were sometimes really useful. The Beaver's friend Eddie Haskell is a great characterization of the unctuous, butter-up-the-boss two-face. "That kid's a real Eddie Haskell." I recall an Andy Griffith episode in which a charismatic drifter (Buddy Ebsen) lures Opie into a hedonistic hobo mindset, for a while, before Andy finds a way reinforce responsibility. Not sure you'll find much like that now.
Does anyone else remember the John Prine song with the refrain "Blow up your TV, throw away your papers, move to the country, build you a home. Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and try and find Jesus, on your own". He was such a treasure.
Without the subtle blue light Queen Hillary would have just ended her eight year quest to become a Trillionaire, there would be no Donald Trump, no UK Reform, no AfD in Germany. And every single human would be vax injured.
This is a double edge sword tho. Because without technology you lose a competitive edge in the real world.
Which then requires you to dependent on others for the power of technology to operate in today's world. Shunning it could eventually lead to the inverse. And those in authority are more than happy to make your decision their priority; your agency.
Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.
I don't think it's realistic nor healthy to run from it
The human race has always had to struggle: struggle to stay alive, struggle to grow enough food, struggle against enemies, struggle for employment, and struggle for "stuff". We seem to think that if all of our material needs are met, the struggle is over - paradise found. But the struggle goes on. Now we must struggle with technology, to master it, to control it, and to prevent being mastered by it. In the past, failure in our struggles usually meant death, but now it means a living death.
Agreed.. It's my fervent hope that some day our young uns' education will be learning how to learn, rather than being lectured and inculcated with stultifying state sponsored propaganda.
And current day teachers are not mentors - not even close. <sigh>
i dont think the blue light is irradiating your brain or trance inducing. the content can be and the delivery mechanism while it is novel can definitely be enrapturing, but the content itself when one isnt inoculated against its wiles is the real culprit we need to deal with.
Dependency eventually turns into disability (literally) . That's what we're seeing now. Nothing is a free choice when you depend on it, excepting fear, because fear is 100% dependent on you for its survival. They fear knowing themselves.
The do-nothing, get-everything plan eventually acclimates the mind to crave what it should revile. The next step is not even knowing you've lost the most important thing for growth; introspection. For without introspection you will never be motivated to pursue self improvement.
If you don't have individuality, self-love, independent thoughts, & self-reliance, what do you hope to share with another person?
Nothing but dependency. And our society has fallen so far into that abyss it's no longer cognizant of the trap.
While Sam Adams was organizing the tea party, Alexander Tytler was giving lectures in the UK why democracies always fail. According to Tytler’s cycle of a democracy, it takes spirituality to have the courage for liberty. I think Alexander Tytler’s cycle of democracy, where dependency is the last stage of a democracy is very accurate. It makes sense because once people are dependent on the government, they are well…dependent on the government for everything. It falls in line with what Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” And Jefferson echoed that when he said the government that gives us everything, can take everything away.
This concept explains very succinctly why I choose to work for myself instead of signing up for disability benefits. I’ve qualified for full disability in several ways for years. My medical records for just the last two years are inches thick. But I do not wish to cede my agency to the government. I will be self reliant to the maximum extent I can for as long as I can.
Democracy defined as one man one vote is doomed to fail. It is only another name for mob rule. There must be an unchangeable constitution protecting property and minority rights. Any voting must be apportioned to those bearing the tax burden.
El Gato expect you’d appreciate ‘Michael Strong's Entrepreneurial Solutions’ on substack….Founder of The Socratic Experience, a virtual school grades 3-12, author of The Habit of Thought and Be the Solution, thirty years creating innovative schools. Executive Director of the Adolescent Flourishing Initiative at the University of Austin.
Sometimes people say to me, “it worked for you because your kids are so smart!” No, my kids are *not* exceptional. That’s the point. They are not geniuses, they are not wunderkinds. They, and their friends, *are what healthy humans turn out to be if you just unfetter them.*
We had no curriculum, no kitchen table lessons, no objectives. We had tons of video games, ate lots of junk food, filled trick or treat bags with KitKats. Their entire circle, to varying degrees, grew up like this. And yet, in their teens, these kids are, practically-speaking, a different species from most of their peers. They feel like colonial adventurers trying to understand mysterious customs when they take college courses or play on sports teams or work retail jobs with people their ages. These kids have started businesses, written books, designed video games, fixed cars, built houses, just because they keep doing what interests them, without being told to do, think, or be, otherwise.
Vonnegut predicted the danger of critical race theory and equalizing towards the lowest common denominator with his short story, Harrison Bergeron. Is it a coincidence that Critical Race Theory combined with the advent of social media has given an astronomically off the charts rise in children thinking they were born in the wrong body? When “teachers” indoctrinate CRT to young white children, they begin to hate themselves; they are too young to understand that their young minds are being manipulated by an illogical theory. They, in turn, become victims since it “works” in 21st century America.
what he perhaps underestimated was how many in the society would gleefully side with dianna moon glompers so long as it gained them a little relative status.
True. When you look at Covid-19 as the global human experiment that Covid was, Solomon Asch could have predicted the outcome in the 1950s. In his conformity experiment, only 10%-30% of the people are strong enough in their own opinions/beliefs that they won’t conform to what they know is wrong, while the majority (mob) – conform, no matter how outlandish the idea. It’s crazy to think that nearly 70% bow down to mob opinion. Yikes!
George Orwell's "Prevention of Literature" (1946) has a passage that speaks to this, as well as the need to prevent the spread of knowledge of the dangerous psychological sciences used to control the masses:
"When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons."
I recall being horrified that all the communists loved that story at the same time they were advocating for its real life application to society. Here we are.
“We are engaged in a massive national experiment, making all schoolchildren fit one behavioral mold; the results speak for themselves. Reading and math scores have not risen, but mindless acceptance of orthodoxy certainly has. The dream of certain educational reformers for centuries, it is only in the past couple decades that factory education has become reality, thanks to the power of Big Pharma. When students of the past did not fit, there was not that much even the most authoritarian teacher could do about it. Today, however, the choice is starker: Conform or be drugged. We used to make dystopian movies about it; now we make our children live it.“
More on impossible lessons here - on how you simply cannot teach freedom in a modern school, for to do so would be to subvert the premise of the school itself:
Well said! The three books you reference are the blueprint for where we are today. Few points about AI: 1. who programmed it? 2. Whose bias was programmed into it? 3. Why?
Any computer program depends on human interaction from start to its goal. Google’s bias is in the search algorithm. If you don’t think so do a basic search on a topic the left pushes and see if you get the opposite view.
It's community organizing on steroids, likely funded by us taxpayers through some of that revealed by DOGE. We are/were literally funding our own demise. Beyond evil.
This is the part that scares me the most. I fear the entire current US Execute branch is not a triumph of populism saving us from the cartoonishly evil globalists, but instead a mass data harvesting, deeply guard-railed limited hangout. I voted Trump, having walked away from the democratic party a few presidential cycles ago and after living in the Seattle suburbs for two decades. I’ve seen the outcome of educational indoctrination and the insidiousness of low expectations first hand. But here we have AI whiz kids in all our data and reshaping institutions without transparency. I feel like the baby springbok looking up at the cheetah and wondering ‘is it hungry?’
I hang my head in shame and moan a mantra of mea culpa.
Back in 2009 at the onset of the h1n1 scamdemic, I was working at CSR / NIH reviewing all the Challenge Grant applications seeking the Obama 'Splurge' funds aka 'his stimulus' package. Large Language Models were tops on his list to be funded, of course which had nothing to do with h1n1 or response to it. I tried to steer the monies to databases but Artificial Intelligence pursuits were their 'wet dream' come true.
As for the current AI available nowadays ... I despise them all as extremely Orwellian. If, as you say, we can get 'free' systems, then kudos to you. But I still believe most will use it to further progress into absolute 'lazy brain' status. Homeschooling kids out in the forests ala the Nordic ways, teaching pragmatic survival skills, provides soooo much more of what they deserve from us.
btw, your essay is brilliant !! as usual, filled with so many metaphors and literary references. I sigh, though, when I realize most of the younger generation will find it baffling, its content comprehension lost to them.
Currently there is a huge kerfuffle over whether AI should be allowed to learn from copyrighted items in the Library of Congress. IMO, that would be a damn sight better than training it on the typings of the pedos at Reddit....
I quit using Google Search years ago. Sadly, too many people don't realize there are alternatives. And of course, who knows how good the alternatives are…
It is almost impossible to get information contrary to corporate narratives in search results. Links to Scientific studies and facts that destroy those narratives are disappeared. I have yet to find a search engine that will give the results I'm looking for when trying to find contrary evidence to mainstream lies.
Bravo at least has an option called “goggles” that allows you to look at something from liberal or conservative sources. You still have to do fair amount of research and reading to get to the truth of a subject and still requires reasoning on your part to filter and analyze.
Google is the worst of the worst - not only do their algorithms curate search results they also stealthily curate your query. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), AKA pay to play. Privacia.org (Switzerland) has been my goto ever since its inception.
"Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified."
Definitely… I think I have Yandex, but I have been moving around to different ones. Even Yandex has all of the mainstream narratives first… CDC… FDA… Government this and government that… MSNBC and CNN right there at the top of every search… It’s irritating to say the least! 😬😵😡
I happen to be at a friend's domicile, and they had the Transnational captured MSM on the screen. The captured MSM referred to illegal aliens as " migrants". My friends other half muttered something about those poor people. They did not pick up on the rebranding of illegals to sway opinion.
Correct. See also: Minor Attracted Persons (pedos), Gender Reassignment (sex change surgery) and Gender Affirming Care (child sterilization and genital mutilation). Straight out of 1984 newspeak.
The subjugation of AI was inevitable. About 2 years ago, the elite were freaking out about AI and clamored for controls. You could tell the moment that happened, when they stopped freaking out. You don't hear anyone talking about controlling AI now, because the controls are already in place.
We talk about the foreseers in this post, but The Matrix is a really good allegory of modern society. We are plugged in. Why do you think so many freaked out and clamored for the return of TikTok? Control. Armies of influencers are the forward patrols of the state. They take the oppressive ideas of the state (DEI, centralized education, etc.) and twist them to be popularized through funny posts, skits, and dances. The Chinese know the power of control devices like this, why do you think they prop this up? Weaken your enemy from within, not from overt attack. The global shift is already occurring. American influence is waning, because the world elite and global actors do not want free thought. The Russians started it through the KGB subversion operations during the 1960's through 1980's. They weren't here to collect intelligence, they were here to weaken us from the inside. It worked, because it really set the stage for where we play today...Four stages of the process: Destabilize, Demoralize, Crisis, and Normalization...We are in the endgame...
The same people who control and manipulate internet search results control “AI”. Don’t let the appealing sizzle fool you into thinking you’re getting a Wagyu A5 rib steak — it’s still the same tough, dry, USDA Select chuck.
Hey when the local library sends out a survey and asks me my gender with the option “other”, and another question asking if you were born male or female or “other” there is something seriously bad going on in the United Kingdom of hell.
Orwell, Huxley and Bradbury were from the last classically educated generation, the foundation being the Trivium: grammar; logic; and rhetoric. They understood language, how to construct and deconstruct arguments and how to persuade. If the population is educated like this mass media does not work, marketing does not work and ‘democratic’ politics does not work. There is no manufacturing of consent. Deliberate’Progressive’ education reform to ensure a compliant population in the wake of WWII.
So few of us can "see." I feel like I'm living in the movie "They Live", but I'm not Rowdy Roddy Piper, but just a little old man, growing older and weaker every day. Incapable of forcing or cajoling anyone else into putting on the glasses.
The main question with They Live is if it is literally or just metaphorically true. Movies like that and The Matrix sure seem to hit people like a ton of bricks, and then shape the way they forever see the world.
End the D/Ed. Fire the “Teachers” Unions. End “Teacher” Certification and Education Degrees; they have clearly failed.
The first law of Pedagogy: It is really important to know the subject you are teaching.
In the military I was taught how to teach. First by being taught about several particular subjects. Then by being taught to teach (short course). Then by teaching myself. Of course, in the military I first had to master the subject I was teaching as a practitioner.
What do teachers learn in teachers colleges other than propaganda? They spend years gaining the knowledge that one can acquire in a few months while knowing almost nothing about the subject they will teach.
It’s worse than that. They rarely have any mastery of the subject they teach. Mrs. Blue hair taught 9th grade algebra last year, but this year we need an 11th grade world history teacher, so now Mrs. Blue hair is a history teacher. Public school is a complete waste of resources. It’s overpriced daycare that caters to the lowest common denominator. When my kids were young I was an oblivious 20 something, if I started a family today my kids would never step foot in a public school.
They learn a critical pedagogy peddled by a Brazilian lunatic named Paolo Feiere. His ravings are loaded in university education curriculum. The fruit of this March Through Institutions is being felt now.
I'm a retired Petroleum Engineer that taught HS Math for 10+ years in the middle of my career. If I could give the youth of America one gift, it would be school choice. OUTSTANDING post!
Started homeschooling our children when they were in grade six, 1988. My son had been falling between cracks, losing his confidence. My dd was bright and bored with school. As well, it was a Catholic school, and the faith was not being transmitted, and there were errors. Further, modern social expectations and lax morals were increasingly evident.
Found a US Catholic homeschooling school. We really could not afford it, but could not afford not to. I knew too much; I knew I was called to do this. Further, we knew this was a war for our children’s souls. We made do; we cut back.
They homeschooled through HS, went on to colleges and started careers. They are married, have lots of happy homeschooled children who are finished schooling by lunch and can pursue crafts, and outdoor / creative activities. The older ones have afternoon farm jobs and are saving a bundle of money for … trade schools. Phones for older ones are only for texting re work/travel. No TV. Yes, computers for online schooling and research. Computers are parent passworded. Yes, they are innocent - beautifully innocent in the best sort of way. Yes, they are comfortable and sociable around adults. And they are very cognizant about world affairs, unlike some of their public school peers.
The world seeks to grab the hearts, minds and souls of our children. We must, must, must push back. Is it easy? No. Rewarding? Absolutely. We’d do it all over again. Fr John Hardon SJ laughingly said three decades ago that homeschooled children might be the only literate people left 😅
Thanks very much for sharing your homeschooling story. I really enjoyed reading it. I live in Oklahoma. There has been an incredible increase in homeschooling, especially post-scamdemic. I hope it continues to grow.
We used Seton Homeschooling out of Front Royal, Virginia, as do our children currently use with our grandchildren. Grades 1-12.
You can use the entire curriculum for each grade which includes excellent books and workbooks, plus online assistance. Every week and every day is laid out for you.
Others just order the Seton books and workbooks at a reduced rate (they come with answer keys).
Some prefer live online classes. Queen of Heaven Academy from Arizona offers this.
An excellent resource is Homeschool Connections out of the US which offers hundreds of topics and subjects you view online - and are graded by the teacher. You can pay for these live online classes that are graded - or pay much less by watching recorded classes. Ideal for high school and interested adults.
If you want people to be able to think logically, get rid of the thing that is making them think illogically - the trance-inducing, pulsing blue light from the screen that is irradiating their brain, while trusting the department of education.
They've confused it with the department of subjugation.
I'm so old, I remember when television was a new thing. My parents' generation grew up without it. It wasn't long before TV was colloquially referred to as the 'boob tube'.
It's not so much how good or bad the content was, as that you simply sat there and absorbed what it showed you. No interaction, no thought process, no participation. Ideal for 'boobs'.
This time, about 75 years ago is the first time that such a device existed. Prior to that, and for the entire existence of mankind, all human interaction was participatory to at least some degree. Just sitting there and absorbing content was unknown. Imagine that!
Talking movies predate TV by about 30 years, but you didn't spend every evening watching them.
I can easily see the degree to which many people today presume that their civic duty is to absorb the dictates of their 'leaders'. Intellectually, they are incapable of sorting thru conflicting points of view, so they just pick a side. Today, many of those people are teachers.
You could learn something from shows like Leave It To Beaver, just not calculus.
I know early 60s TV isn't the Great Books of Western Civ, however, the cultural touchstones provided were sometimes really useful. The Beaver's friend Eddie Haskell is a great characterization of the unctuous, butter-up-the-boss two-face. "That kid's a real Eddie Haskell." I recall an Andy Griffith episode in which a charismatic drifter (Buddy Ebsen) lures Opie into a hedonistic hobo mindset, for a while, before Andy finds a way reinforce responsibility. Not sure you'll find much like that now.
yes. total brainwashing.
my parents called television the "idiot box." they inherently distrusted it and for many years consigned it to the basement.
That's right. I'd forgotten the term, "idiot box".
I remember too.
Does anyone else remember the John Prine song with the refrain "Blow up your TV, throw away your papers, move to the country, build you a home. Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and try and find Jesus, on your own". He was such a treasure.
Yes! I saw Prine live a couple of times. (Once with Bonnie Raitt before she was BIG).
Prine could see the worst in us and still maintain a positive attitude.
Without the subtle blue light Queen Hillary would have just ended her eight year quest to become a Trillionaire, there would be no Donald Trump, no UK Reform, no AfD in Germany. And every single human would be vax injured.
You are correct. Technology is always a double edged sword.
Without substack.com we would have been confined to the TOR / Qortal networks and the censorship would have been even worse.
The fall of the iron curtain of carefully curated information… we USED to not have ways of looking things up… DYOR… Do your own research… 👍🏽
I’m done with “white coat” worship… I can look up stuff myself…
Btw, Homeschool… 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
This is a double edge sword tho. Because without technology you lose a competitive edge in the real world.
Which then requires you to dependent on others for the power of technology to operate in today's world. Shunning it could eventually lead to the inverse. And those in authority are more than happy to make your decision their priority; your agency.
Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.
I don't think it's realistic nor healthy to run from it
The human race has always had to struggle: struggle to stay alive, struggle to grow enough food, struggle against enemies, struggle for employment, and struggle for "stuff". We seem to think that if all of our material needs are met, the struggle is over - paradise found. But the struggle goes on. Now we must struggle with technology, to master it, to control it, and to prevent being mastered by it. In the past, failure in our struggles usually meant death, but now it means a living death.
Agreed.. It's my fervent hope that some day our young uns' education will be learning how to learn, rather than being lectured and inculcated with stultifying state sponsored propaganda.
And current day teachers are not mentors - not even close. <sigh>
Yeah, but ...
Woodrow Wilson got elected and was allowed to do all the evil shit he did without the boob tube.
i dont think the blue light is irradiating your brain or trance inducing. the content can be and the delivery mechanism while it is novel can definitely be enrapturing, but the content itself when one isnt inoculated against its wiles is the real culprit we need to deal with.
Wow. Standing O.
Dependency eventually turns into disability (literally) . That's what we're seeing now. Nothing is a free choice when you depend on it, excepting fear, because fear is 100% dependent on you for its survival. They fear knowing themselves.
The do-nothing, get-everything plan eventually acclimates the mind to crave what it should revile. The next step is not even knowing you've lost the most important thing for growth; introspection. For without introspection you will never be motivated to pursue self improvement.
If you don't have individuality, self-love, independent thoughts, & self-reliance, what do you hope to share with another person?
Nothing but dependency. And our society has fallen so far into that abyss it's no longer cognizant of the trap.
dependency is not the final state of degradation and demoralization.
losing the concept that it could be any other way is.
if the prisoners are not even aware that they are in prison, what hope have they of escape?
While Sam Adams was organizing the tea party, Alexander Tytler was giving lectures in the UK why democracies always fail. According to Tytler’s cycle of a democracy, it takes spirituality to have the courage for liberty. I think Alexander Tytler’s cycle of democracy, where dependency is the last stage of a democracy is very accurate. It makes sense because once people are dependent on the government, they are well…dependent on the government for everything. It falls in line with what Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” And Jefferson echoed that when he said the government that gives us everything, can take everything away.
This concept explains very succinctly why I choose to work for myself instead of signing up for disability benefits. I’ve qualified for full disability in several ways for years. My medical records for just the last two years are inches thick. But I do not wish to cede my agency to the government. I will be self reliant to the maximum extent I can for as long as I can.
Great comment. Need to look into Tytler, thanks.
Thanks. Yeah, it's very interesting: https://lizlasorte.substack.com/p/history-tells-us-that-democracies?r=76q58
Democracy defined as one man one vote is doomed to fail. It is only another name for mob rule. There must be an unchangeable constitution protecting property and minority rights. Any voting must be apportioned to those bearing the tax burden.
This reminds me of Plato’s Cave Allegory
"if the prisoners are not even aware that they are in prison, what hope have they of escape?"
Describes the left today perfectly. They are oblivious to the ideological prison they have confined themselves to.
El Gato expect you’d appreciate ‘Michael Strong's Entrepreneurial Solutions’ on substack….Founder of The Socratic Experience, a virtual school grades 3-12, author of The Habit of Thought and Be the Solution, thirty years creating innovative schools. Executive Director of the Adolescent Flourishing Initiative at the University of Austin.
What do you think i mean by disability?
Exactly what you're saying
So, one man's prison is another man's freedom?
Isn't that what im saying
If not that was the intention...but i am trying to drive a text at the same time...lol
"i am trying to drive a text at the same time" - DON'T DO THAT! EVER!!
I know. Bad habit. But usually I do it through voice activation but still not the same as thinking your thought process through on a keyboard.
They fear knowing themselves.🎯
Sometimes people say to me, “it worked for you because your kids are so smart!” No, my kids are *not* exceptional. That’s the point. They are not geniuses, they are not wunderkinds. They, and their friends, *are what healthy humans turn out to be if you just unfetter them.*
We had no curriculum, no kitchen table lessons, no objectives. We had tons of video games, ate lots of junk food, filled trick or treat bags with KitKats. Their entire circle, to varying degrees, grew up like this. And yet, in their teens, these kids are, practically-speaking, a different species from most of their peers. They feel like colonial adventurers trying to understand mysterious customs when they take college courses or play on sports teams or work retail jobs with people their ages. These kids have started businesses, written books, designed video games, fixed cars, built houses, just because they keep doing what interests them, without being told to do, think, or be, otherwise.
Bravo to you and your family!
Thank you! But we're not special! It doesn't take much to do better than school.
Amazing… Our homeschool was a little more structured, but the kiddos are doing fine… I was very careful about what curriculum I used… 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
We sure have had a lot to talk about this past five years! 🤨🤨🤨
My 24-year-old sent me a picture of a 3-D printed shot 💉 as a joke… lol 😆
I told him, “Should I shoot you now or wait until I get home?” 😉 referencing Bugs Bunny and Daffy duck of course…
They have heard me rant and rave for the past several years now!
Anyway, Great job mama! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Vonnegut predicted the danger of critical race theory and equalizing towards the lowest common denominator with his short story, Harrison Bergeron. Is it a coincidence that Critical Race Theory combined with the advent of social media has given an astronomically off the charts rise in children thinking they were born in the wrong body? When “teachers” indoctrinate CRT to young white children, they begin to hate themselves; they are too young to understand that their young minds are being manipulated by an illogical theory. They, in turn, become victims since it “works” in 21st century America.
what he perhaps underestimated was how many in the society would gleefully side with dianna moon glompers so long as it gained them a little relative status.
True. When you look at Covid-19 as the global human experiment that Covid was, Solomon Asch could have predicted the outcome in the 1950s. In his conformity experiment, only 10%-30% of the people are strong enough in their own opinions/beliefs that they won’t conform to what they know is wrong, while the majority (mob) – conform, no matter how outlandish the idea. It’s crazy to think that nearly 70% bow down to mob opinion. Yikes!
I read a statistic that only 18% of the US population chose not to take the covid shots. It’s startling and predictable at the same time.
The Miligram experiment… 😵
George Orwell's "Prevention of Literature" (1946) has a passage that speaks to this, as well as the need to prevent the spread of knowledge of the dangerous psychological sciences used to control the masses:
"When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons."
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
[passage quoted above is in the third from last paragraphs in the piece]
I recall being horrified that all the communists loved that story at the same time they were advocating for its real life application to society. Here we are.
Thanks for this reference. I just used this digital world to buy Vonnegut's Welcome to The Monkey House collection.
Yes!
Thank you for bringing this topic up. I wrote about it here:
https://firstthings.com/medicating-the-masses/
Where are NPCs made? In the classroom:
“We are engaged in a massive national experiment, making all schoolchildren fit one behavioral mold; the results speak for themselves. Reading and math scores have not risen, but mindless acceptance of orthodoxy certainly has. The dream of certain educational reformers for centuries, it is only in the past couple decades that factory education has become reality, thanks to the power of Big Pharma. When students of the past did not fit, there was not that much even the most authoritarian teacher could do about it. Today, however, the choice is starker: Conform or be drugged. We used to make dystopian movies about it; now we make our children live it.“
More on impossible lessons here - on how you simply cannot teach freedom in a modern school, for to do so would be to subvert the premise of the school itself:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/what-if-students-arent-learning-because
The public school model is that eventually, no matter what shape you are, you will fit into our mold.
So truthful that it is painful to read.
Well said! The three books you reference are the blueprint for where we are today. Few points about AI: 1. who programmed it? 2. Whose bias was programmed into it? 3. Why?
Any computer program depends on human interaction from start to its goal. Google’s bias is in the search algorithm. If you don’t think so do a basic search on a topic the left pushes and see if you get the opposite view.
open AI and others have "alignment teams."
those teams were almost certainly working in concert with state actors (similar to what happened with social media)
It's community organizing on steroids, likely funded by us taxpayers through some of that revealed by DOGE. We are/were literally funding our own demise. Beyond evil.
This is the part that scares me the most. I fear the entire current US Execute branch is not a triumph of populism saving us from the cartoonishly evil globalists, but instead a mass data harvesting, deeply guard-railed limited hangout. I voted Trump, having walked away from the democratic party a few presidential cycles ago and after living in the Seattle suburbs for two decades. I’ve seen the outcome of educational indoctrination and the insidiousness of low expectations first hand. But here we have AI whiz kids in all our data and reshaping institutions without transparency. I feel like the baby springbok looking up at the cheetah and wondering ‘is it hungry?’
Mon précieux chat,
I hang my head in shame and moan a mantra of mea culpa.
Back in 2009 at the onset of the h1n1 scamdemic, I was working at CSR / NIH reviewing all the Challenge Grant applications seeking the Obama 'Splurge' funds aka 'his stimulus' package. Large Language Models were tops on his list to be funded, of course which had nothing to do with h1n1 or response to it. I tried to steer the monies to databases but Artificial Intelligence pursuits were their 'wet dream' come true.
As for the current AI available nowadays ... I despise them all as extremely Orwellian. If, as you say, we can get 'free' systems, then kudos to you. But I still believe most will use it to further progress into absolute 'lazy brain' status. Homeschooling kids out in the forests ala the Nordic ways, teaching pragmatic survival skills, provides soooo much more of what they deserve from us.
btw, your essay is brilliant !! as usual, filled with so many metaphors and literary references. I sigh, though, when I realize most of the younger generation will find it baffling, its content comprehension lost to them.
- Laura Kragie MD. biomedworks.substack.com
FYI it should be "mon précieux chat" - cat is always masculine in french. "chatte" is the *other* kind of pussy, haha.
oops. my bad. corrected
“Were”?
Currently there is a huge kerfuffle over whether AI should be allowed to learn from copyrighted items in the Library of Congress. IMO, that would be a damn sight better than training it on the typings of the pedos at Reddit....
I quit using Google Search years ago. Sadly, too many people don't realize there are alternatives. And of course, who knows how good the alternatives are…
It is almost impossible to get information contrary to corporate narratives in search results. Links to Scientific studies and facts that destroy those narratives are disappeared. I have yet to find a search engine that will give the results I'm looking for when trying to find contrary evidence to mainstream lies.
Bravo at least has an option called “goggles” that allows you to look at something from liberal or conservative sources. You still have to do fair amount of research and reading to get to the truth of a subject and still requires reasoning on your part to filter and analyze.
Haven't tried Bravo. Thanks for the tip!
Google is the worst of the worst - not only do their algorithms curate search results they also stealthily curate your query. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), AKA pay to play. Privacia.org (Switzerland) has been my goto ever since its inception.
THANKS!!!!! Links I had saved for studies that showed ivermectin's efficacy were dead on other search engines.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8088823/ was the first hit on Privacia!
"Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified."
Exactly… I’m not sure what to use anymore for my search engine. 🤔
"Not Google" would be a good start, at least.
Definitely… I think I have Yandex, but I have been moving around to different ones. Even Yandex has all of the mainstream narratives first… CDC… FDA… Government this and government that… MSNBC and CNN right there at the top of every search… It’s irritating to say the least! 😬😵😡
AI bias re: Covid is clear on Copilot.
https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-coronamania
Race of the lowest common denominator, aka communism, a few miserable people making everyone else miserable too.
Looking for a t-shirt that says "brave new Fahrenheit 1984"
No one will get the joke.
alt take:
2% of people will get the joke and having a screen to attract and identify them could be useful.
Excellent essay.
I happen to be at a friend's domicile, and they had the Transnational captured MSM on the screen. The captured MSM referred to illegal aliens as " migrants". My friends other half muttered something about those poor people. They did not pick up on the rebranding of illegals to sway opinion.
This country is screwed.
Correct. See also: Minor Attracted Persons (pedos), Gender Reassignment (sex change surgery) and Gender Affirming Care (child sterilization and genital mutilation). Straight out of 1984 newspeak.
The subjugation of AI was inevitable. About 2 years ago, the elite were freaking out about AI and clamored for controls. You could tell the moment that happened, when they stopped freaking out. You don't hear anyone talking about controlling AI now, because the controls are already in place.
We talk about the foreseers in this post, but The Matrix is a really good allegory of modern society. We are plugged in. Why do you think so many freaked out and clamored for the return of TikTok? Control. Armies of influencers are the forward patrols of the state. They take the oppressive ideas of the state (DEI, centralized education, etc.) and twist them to be popularized through funny posts, skits, and dances. The Chinese know the power of control devices like this, why do you think they prop this up? Weaken your enemy from within, not from overt attack. The global shift is already occurring. American influence is waning, because the world elite and global actors do not want free thought. The Russians started it through the KGB subversion operations during the 1960's through 1980's. They weren't here to collect intelligence, they were here to weaken us from the inside. It worked, because it really set the stage for where we play today...Four stages of the process: Destabilize, Demoralize, Crisis, and Normalization...We are in the endgame...
The same people who control and manipulate internet search results control “AI”. Don’t let the appealing sizzle fool you into thinking you’re getting a Wagyu A5 rib steak — it’s still the same tough, dry, USDA Select chuck.
Bam. More great insight
Hey when the local library sends out a survey and asks me my gender with the option “other”, and another question asking if you were born male or female or “other” there is something seriously bad going on in the United Kingdom of hell.
Orwell, Huxley and Bradbury were from the last classically educated generation, the foundation being the Trivium: grammar; logic; and rhetoric. They understood language, how to construct and deconstruct arguments and how to persuade. If the population is educated like this mass media does not work, marketing does not work and ‘democratic’ politics does not work. There is no manufacturing of consent. Deliberate’Progressive’ education reform to ensure a compliant population in the wake of WWII.
So few of us can "see." I feel like I'm living in the movie "They Live", but I'm not Rowdy Roddy Piper, but just a little old man, growing older and weaker every day. Incapable of forcing or cajoling anyone else into putting on the glasses.
The main question with They Live is if it is literally or just metaphorically true. Movies like that and The Matrix sure seem to hit people like a ton of bricks, and then shape the way they forever see the world.
End the D/Ed. Fire the “Teachers” Unions. End “Teacher” Certification and Education Degrees; they have clearly failed.
The first law of Pedagogy: It is really important to know the subject you are teaching.
In the military I was taught how to teach. First by being taught about several particular subjects. Then by being taught to teach (short course). Then by teaching myself. Of course, in the military I first had to master the subject I was teaching as a practitioner.
What do teachers learn in teachers colleges other than propaganda? They spend years gaining the knowledge that one can acquire in a few months while knowing almost nothing about the subject they will teach.
It’s worse than that. They rarely have any mastery of the subject they teach. Mrs. Blue hair taught 9th grade algebra last year, but this year we need an 11th grade world history teacher, so now Mrs. Blue hair is a history teacher. Public school is a complete waste of resources. It’s overpriced daycare that caters to the lowest common denominator. When my kids were young I was an oblivious 20 something, if I started a family today my kids would never step foot in a public school.
🎯
They learn a critical pedagogy peddled by a Brazilian lunatic named Paolo Feiere. His ravings are loaded in university education curriculum. The fruit of this March Through Institutions is being felt now.